New York politics

We’ve written repeatedly about the disgraceful role played by Al Sharpton as a power broker and arbiter of racial affairs in the Democratic Party, most recently in “Sharpton’s shape.” In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Heather Mac Donald illuminated the phenomenon in The Democratic embrace of Al Sharpton” (behind the Journal’s subscription paywall, but accessible via Google here). It is a valuable contribution to the discussion. Indeed, it is valuable in »

H.L. Mencken’s line that “democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard” comes to mind when looking at New York and Washington right now. Americans seem to need to be reminded every now and then just what high octane liberalism is like, but better if this laboratory of liberalism is confined to New York City, Illinois, Detroit, etc. »

William F. Buckley’s The Unmaking of a Mayor is less a manifesto or memoir than a (prescient) work of media criticism, yet I’ve been thinking about it in the context of the current New York mayoral campaign. What would Buckley have said about Anthony Weiner and the rest of that motley crew (or Mötley Crüe, for that matter)? The field of Democratic candidates might even have taxed the powers of »

In the New York mayoral doings, the New York Post has moved beyond Carlos Danger, but in this case it does not mean it is attending to the other candidates. It has moved on from Carlos Danger to flash the spotlight on Señora Danger. The online version of the Post features the graphic below. The Post gives the story the kind of flood-the-zone coverage reflective of an episode reaching a »

My conservative cousin from New York, a sober-minded fellow, looks past Carlos Danger and identifies the real scandal in New York — the disastrous policies being peddled by all leading Democratic candidates for mayor. He writes: Lately the New York City Mayoral race has taken on an ominous tone. The carnival atmosphere created by the candidates pathetic pandering to municipal unions and Weiner’s peccadillos is rapidly yielding to disastrous proposals »

I thought that Anthony Weiner was a repulsive human being when he only appeared to be an ambitious congressman on the make and a seemingly permanent fixture on MSNBC. Yet the latest revelations of his post-scandal exhibitionism place him in a category beyond repulsive. In addition to his other vices, he is a little lacking in self-perception. A college professor of mine once speculated that monarchy might be a more »

It’s been too long since my conservative cousin from New York opined on Power Line. So I asked him to review the field of Democrats in the New York mayoral race. Here is his report (and, no, he’s not making this stuff up): The Democratic primary underway for Mayor of New York underscores the truth of H.L. Mencken’s cynical observation that we would be better off picking our leaders the »